What is the Turned Back Experiment? Yaa Gyasi wrote about it in her novel, Transcendent Kingdom. It refers to behavior of your listener. When you speak to another person, s/he turns their back to you. What is the meaning of this? Do you see the Turned Back Experiment with your family members and acquaintances?

Here are some hypothetical interpretations of the Turned Back Experiment:

1. The person does not respect you.
2. The person does not accept reality and the reality of what you had spoken.
3. The person desires to retreat into a shell to avoid you.
4. The person has a serious psychological problem. They may think, “If I don’t see you, you can’t see me either.”

The harm done by her turned back would be minimal; I had already become the person I was going to become, a scientist who understood that what ailed my mother was in fact a disease, even if she refused to recognize it as such.

(Gyasi, p. 50)

Related post

The main book review for Transcendent Kingdom is at https://booksreviewsandmore.com/why-did-gifty-give-her-family-members-nicknames/